The present invention generally relates to the field of electronic social networking systems, and more particularly, to ways of obtaining and selecting appropriate natural language translations of text within a social networking system.
Social networking systems, such as FACEBOOK®, may have large user bases representing many countries and languages. In many cases, users may not be able to understand the content in which they are interested. For example, an international celebrity may submit status updates or other postings on the social networking system, and many of the users who have subscribed to the postings of the celebrity may not be able to read the postings due to language barriers. Providing an “official” translation for all such postings would constitute too large a burden for the social networking system, and the celebrity will typically not provide translations of the posting for alternate languages.
In such cases, the social networking system could allow other users to provide translations of the postings, but there is a risk that the users might provide faulty translations, whether intentionally or unintentionally. For example, a user might intentionally provide a misleading and/or insulting translation for a statement of a celebrity (or other message poster) that the user dislikes, or the user might simply have a poor grasp of the language in question and thus provide a low-quality translation.